Episode 2: 7 Wonders and Character Creation, Backgrounds and Party Cohesion

Episode released on Tuesday, September 20, 2011

In episode #2, the founders go into the Secret Cabal Library and break out 7 Wonders, the city building, resource management card game to give you a walkthrough and review. Tony brings us gaming news coming from Spiel previews being held in Essen Germany in October. Then the founders spend time discussing character creation, character backgrounds, and creating a cohesive party.

Episode Timeline:

In episode #2, the founders go into the Secret Cabal Library and break out 7 Wonders, the city building, resource management card game to give you a walkthrough and review. Tony brings us gaming news coming from Spiel previews being held in Essen Germany in October. Then the founders spend time discussing character creation, character backgrounds, and creating a cohesive party.

Episode Timeline:

7 Wonders Walkthrough: 00:32

7 Wonders Review: 00:39

Gaming News with Tony Topper: 1:15

Character Creation, Backgrounds and Group Cohesion: 01:43

Opening Banter Topics

Chris expresses his excitement at beating the ipad version of Ghost Stories

The Founders discuss their rating system of iphone/ipad games

Brian, Jamie, and Tony played Brass resulting in a very close game

Brian and Chris talk about the story and the lore in the background of Mass Effect and Witcher 2

Jamie continued painting his Prussian Dystopia Wars models

7 Wonders Review

00:32 Walkthrough 00:39 Review Seven Wonders is a card game played out over 3 ages taking roughly 30-45 minutes. The players develop their city or their wonder. During each age, players choose a card from their hand to develop resources, culture, commerce, military, technology, and guilds. Players can instead choose to burn a card to build a stage of a wonder or to generate gold. Then the hand is then passed to the next player. When the hand is depleted the age ends. War breaks out is resolved based on the army size of each city. Then the next age begins. Points are earned for city development, wonder development, and victories in wartime. The player who earns most points wins the game. Check it out on Board Game Geek

Gaming News with Tony Topper

01:15

Ora Et Labora is available for preorder and will be released in November by Z Man Games

Panic Station is now available for preorder with a free mini expansion to ship in mid to late October

Dread Fleet, a naval combat game, from Games Workshop was announced and is available for Advance Order

Character Creation, Backgrounds, and Party Cohesion

01:43 The conversation starts off with the founders talking about a common tabletop first session, the character creation day. The founders then discuss the philosophy of developing a balanced party and express a variety of views on the "holy trinity" composition: damage dealers, tanks (defenders), and healers in a D&D 4E game. When expanding the idea to a generic gaming discussion, the conversation switches to players having unique powers or abilities. From there the founders change pace to discuss character backgrounds providing stat bonuses or powers. From there they talk about min maxing and the loathed (or loved depending upon your particular group) powergamer. Then the founders talk about group templates, how each character is introduced to the group and why they choose to stay together, whether it's implemented in the first game or whether it's determined in advance cooperatively by the group. Throughout the conversation the founders discuss various methods of collectively creating group backgrounds. They continue by discussing various party background templates from games they've played throughout the years.

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About The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast

Five old friends of more than 20 years come together to produce a high quality, bi-weekly podcast about tabletop gaming of all kinds: board games, card games, miniatures, role-playing games and much more. In each episode you can expect board game reviews, gaming industry news and round-table discussions. The Founders, Jamie, Tony, Chris, Steve and Brian, each have varying tastes in gaming to provide a variety of viewpoints. Since 2011, over 100 full length episodes and now more with our new additional show, The Secret Cabal Express, The Secret Cabal has grown to one of the most successful tabletop gaming podcasts in the community. The Founders continue striving to offer irreverent entertainment, thoughtful commentary and enthusiasm about a hobby we love.

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